Jurors begin deliberations in Lacey murder-arson case

Surveillance videos that prosecutors say show murder and arson defendant Caleb Lacey's car near the scene of the deadly North Lawrence fire when it started were the first pieces of evidence requested by jurors as they began deliberations Tuesday.

Judge Jerald Carter sent the panel home at 6 p.m. after they had gotten the case and deliberated about two hours, telling them to stay home Wednesday because of the impending snowstorm.

Prosecutor Michael Canty, in his closing argument, called jurors' attention to several points made during the three-week trial: One expert identified Lacey's Jaguar on a videotape as the vehicle passing the fire scene, just moments after the blaze was set Feb. 19. Arson dogs found gasoline on Lacey's fire pants. And Lacey, then 19 - who hardly ever reported to nighttime calls - showed up at the Lawrence-Cedarhurst firehouse just two minutes before the alarm for the blaze sounded.

But Lacey's defense lawyer, Christopher Cassar, told the jury the prosecutor's evidence is shaky and circumstantial at best. "They cannot prove that Caleb Lacey started that fire because he didn't," Cassar said in his closing argument. As Cassar spoke, Lacey's father, the Rev. Richard Lacey, watched intently from the courtroom's last row, one hand at his chin and the other around his wife's shoulder.

In October, during pretrial hearings in the case, Carter threw out an eight-hour videotape of a detective interrogating Lacey that ended, prosecutors say, with Lacey's full confession to the crime. The sound quality on that tape was so poor that Carter ruled it was not good enough to play for a jury.

Later, Carter also ruled that the detective who interrogated Lacey, Carl Re, could not testify about anything that Lacey said after he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself about midway through the interrogation, meaning that jurors never learned about the confession at all.

With the videotaped confession ruled inadmissible, the evidence that Canty focused on in his closing argument was a series of surveillance videos that, taken together, show what appears to be Lacey's car near the house that burned about the time that the fire was set, then driving away from the fire scene to the firehouse. Lacey told police that he never drove by the house on the morning of the fire.

Cassar was incredulous that the car shown on the videos was Lacey's. He said there is no compelling physical or scientific evidence tying his client to the crime. "They [prosecutors] don't want to look at the facts of the case," Cassar said.

As he has done throughout the trial, Cassar tried to cast suspicion on Edit Vanegas, whose wife, stepson and two daughters were killed in the fire. Vanegas escaped by jumping out a window with his two young sons.